"Obedience is the true holocaust which we sacrifice to God on the altar of our hearts."

St Philip Neri

* * *

"Many words do not satisfy the soul; but a good life eases the mind and a clean conscience inspires great trust in God."

Thomas á Kempis

* * *

"The more you know and the better you understand, the more severely will you be judged, unless your life is also the more holy. Do not be proud, therefore, because of your learning or skill. Rather, fear because of the talent given you."

THE profound and original thought which St. John of
the Cross bestowed upon so abstruse a subject, and
upon one on which there was so little classical
literature in Spanish when he wrote, led him to
clothe his ideas in a language at once energetic,
precise and of a high degree of individuality. His
style reflects his thought, but it reflects the style
of no school and of no other writer whatsoever.

This is natural enough, for thought and feeling were
always uppermost in the Saint: style and language
take a place entirely subordinate to them. Never did
he sacrifice any idea to artistic combinations of
words; never blur over any delicate shade of thought
to enhance some rhythmic cadence of musical prose.
Literary form (to use a figure which he himself might
have coined) is only present at all in his works in
the sense in which the industrious and deferential
servant is present in the ducal apartment, for the
purpose of rendering faithful service to his lord and
master. This subordination of style to content in the
Saint's work is one of its most eminent qualities. He
is a great writer, but not a great stylist. The
strength and robustness of his intellect everywhere
predominate.

This to a large extent explains the negligences which
we find in his style, the frequency with which it is
marred by repetitions and its occasional degeneration
into diffuseness. The long, unwieldy sentences, one
of which will sometimes run to the length of a
reasonably sized paragraph, are certainly a trial to
many a reader. So intent is the Saint upon
explaining, underlining and developing his points so
that they shall be apprehended as perfectly as may
be, that he continually recurs to what he has already
said, and repeats words, phrases and even passages of
considerable length without scruple. It is only fair
to remind the reader that such things were far
commoner in the Golden Age than they are to-day; most
didactic Spanish prose of that period would be
notably improved, from a modern standpoint, if its
volume were cut down by about one-third.

Be that as it may, these defects in the prose of St.
John of the Cross are amply compensated by the
fullness of his phraseology, the wealth and profusion
of his imagery, the force and the energy of his
argument. He has only to be compared with the
didactic writers who were his contemporaries for this
to become apparent. Together with Luis de Granada,
Luis de León, Juan de los Ángeles and Luis de la
Puente,[22] he created a genuinely native language,
purged of Latinisms, precise and eloquent, which
Spanish writers have used ever since in writing of
mystical theology.

The most sublime of all the Spanish mystics, he soars
aloft on the wings of Divine love to heights known to
hardly any of them. Though no words can express the
loftiest of the experiences which he describes, we
are never left with the impression that word, phrase
or image has failed him. If it does not exist, he
appears to invent it, rather than pause in his
description in order to search for an expression of
the idea that is in his mind or be satisfied with a
prolix paraphrase. True to the character of his
thought, his style is always forceful and energetic,
even to a fault.

We have said nothing of his poems, for indeed they
call for no purely literary commentary. How full of
life the greatest of them are, how rich in meaning,
how unforgettable and how inimitable, the individual
reader may see at a glance or may learn from his own
experience. Many of their exquisite figures their
author owes, directly or indirectly, to his reading
and assimilation of the Bible. Some of them, however,
have acquired a new life in the form which he has
given them. A line here, a phrase there, has taken
root in the mind of some later poet or essayist and
has given rise to a new work of art, to many lovers
of which the Saint who lies behind it is unknown.
It is perhaps not an exaggeration to say that the
verse and prose works combined of St. John of the
Cross form at once the most grandiose and the most
melodious spiritual canticle to which any one man has
ever given utterance. It is impossible, in the space
at our disposal, to quote at any length from the
Spanish critics who have paid tribute to its
comprehensiveness and profundity. We must content
ourselves with a short quotation characterizing the
Saint's poems, taken from the greatest of these
critics, Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo, who, besides
referring frequently to St. John of the Cross in such
of his mature works as the Heterodoxos, Ideas
Estéticas and Ciencia Española, devoted to him a
great part of the address which he delivered as a
young man at his official reception into the Spanish
Academy under the title of 'Mystical Poetry.'

'So sublime,' wrote Menéndez Pelayo, 'is this poetry
[of St. John of the Cross] that it scarcely seems to
belong to this world at all; it is hardly capable of
being assessed by literary criteria. More ardent in
its passion than any profane poetry, its form is as
elegant and exquisite, as plastic and as highly
figured as any of the finest works of the
Renaissance. The spirit of God has passed through
these poems every one, beautifying and sanctifying
them on its way.'

III
DIFFUSION OF THE WRITINGS OF ST. JOHN OF THE CROSS --
LOSS OF THE AUTOGRAPHS -- GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF
THE MANUSCRIPTS

The outstanding qualities of St. John of the Cross's
writings were soon recognized by the earliest of
their few and privileged readers. All such persons,
of course, belonged to a small circle composed of the
Saint's intimate friends and disciples. As time went
on, the circle widened repeatedly; now it embraces
the entire Church, and countless individual souls who
are filled with the spirit of Christianity.
First of all, the works were read and discussed in
those loci of evangelical zeal which the Saint had
himself enkindled, by his word and example, at Beas,
El Calvario, Baeza and Granada. They could not have
come more opportunely. St. Teresa's Reform had
engendered a spiritual alertness and energy
reminiscent of the earliest days of Christianity.
Before this could in any way diminish, her first
friar presented the followers of them both with
spiritual food to nourish and re-create their souls
and so to sustain the high degree of zeal for Our
Lord which He had bestowed upon them.

In one sense, St. John of the Cross took up his pen
in order to supplement the writings of St. Teresa; on
several subjects, for example, he abstained from
writing at length because she had already treated of
them.[23] Much of the work of the two Saints,
however, of necessity covers the same ground, and
thus the great mystical school of the Spanish
Carmelites is reinforced at its very beginnings in a
way which must be unique in the history of mysticism.
The writings of St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross,
though of equal value and identical aim, are in many
respects very different in their nature; together
they cover almost the entire ground of orthodox
mysticism, both speculative and experimental. The
Carmelite mystics who came after them were able to
build upon a broad and sure foundation.

The writings of St. John of the Cross soon became
known outside the narrow circle of his sons and
daughters in religion. In a few years they had gone
all over Spain and reached Portugal, France and
Italy. They were read by persons of every social
class, from the Empress Maria of Austria, sister of
Philip II, to the most unlettered nuns of St.
Teresa's most remote foundations. One of the
witnesses at the process for the beatification
declared that he knew of no works of which there
existed so many copies, with the exception of the
Bible.
We may fairly suppose (and the supposition is
confirmed by the nature of the extant manuscripts)
that the majority of the early copies were made by
friars and nuns of the Discalced Reform. Most
Discalced houses must have had copies and others were
probably in the possession of members of other
Orders. We gather, too, from various sources, that
even lay persons managed to make or obtain copies of
the manuscripts.

How many of these copies, it will be asked, were made
directly from the autographs? So vague is the
available evidence on this question that it is
difficult to attempt any calculation of even
approximate reliability. All we can say is that the
copies made by, or for, the Discalced friars and nuns
themselves are the earliest and most trustworthy,
while those intended for the laity were frequently
made at third or fourth hand. The Saint himself seems
to have written out only one manuscript of each
treatise and none of these has come down to us. Some
think that he destroyed the manuscripts copied with
his own hand, fearing that they might come to be
venerated for other reasons than that of the value of
their teaching. He was, of course, perfectly capable
of such an act of abnegation; once, as we know, in
accordance with his own principles, he burned some
letters of St. Teresa, which he had carried with him
for years, for no other reason than that he realized
that he was becoming attached to them.[24]

The only manuscript of his that we possess consists
of a few pages of maxims, some letters and one or two
documents which he wrote when he was Vicar-Provincial
of Andalusia.[25] So numerous and so thorough have
been the searches made for further autographs during
the last three centuries that further discoveries of
any importance seem most unlikely. We have,
therefore, to console ourselves with manuscripts,
such as the Sanlúcar de Barrameda Codex of the
Spiritual Canticle, which bear the Saint's autograph
corrections as warrants of their integrity.

The vagueness of much of the evidence concerning the
manuscripts to which we have referred extends to the
farthest possible limit -- that of using the word
'original' to indicate 'autograph' and 'copy'
indifferently. Even in the earliest documents we can
never be sure which sense is intended. Furthermore,
there was a passion in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries for describing all kinds of old manuscripts
as autographs, and thus we find copies so described
in which the hand bears not the slightest resemblance
to that of the Saint, as the most superficial
collation with a genuine specimen of his hand would
have made evident. We shall give instances of this in
describing the extant copies of individual treatises.
One example of a general kind, however, may be quoted
here to show the extent to which the practice spread.
In a statement made, with reference to one of the
processes, at the convent of Discalced Carmelite nuns
of Valladolid, a certain M. María de la Trinidad
deposed 'that a servant of God, a Franciscan tertiary
named Ana María, possesses the originals of the books
of our holy father, and has heard that he sent them
to the Order.' Great importance was attached to this
deposition and every possible measure was taken to
find the autographs -- needless to say, without
result.[26]

With the multiplication of the number of copies of
St. John of the Cross's writings, the number of
variants naturally multiplied also. The early copies
having all been made for devotional purposes, by
persons with little or no palaeographical knowledge,
many of whom did not even exercise common care, it is
not surprising that there is not a single one which
can compare in punctiliousness with certain extant
eighteenth-century copies of documents connected with
St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa. These were made
by a painstaking friar called Manuel de Santa María,
whose scrupulousness went so far that he reproduced
imperfectly formed letters exactly as they were
written, adding the parts that were lacking (e.g.,
the tilde over the letter ñ) with ink of another
colour.

We may lament that this good father had no
predecessor like himself to copy the Saint's
treatises, but it is only right to say that the
copies we possess are sufficiently faithful and
numerous to give us reasonably accurate versions of
their originals. The important point about them is
that they bear no signs of bad faith, nor even of the
desire (understandable enough in those unscientific
days) to clarify the sense of their original, or even
to improve upon its teaching. Their errors are often
gross ones, but the large majority of them are quite
easy to detect and put right. The impression to this
effect which one obtains from a casual perusal of
almost any of these copies is quite definitely
confirmed by a comparison of them with copies
corrected by the Saint or written by the closest and
most trusted of his disciples. It may be added that
some of the variants may, for aught we know to the
contrary, be the Saint's own work, since it is not
improbable that he may have corrected more than one
copy of some of his writings, and not been entirely
consistent.

There are, broadly speaking, two classes into which
the copies (more particularly those of the Ascent and
the Dark Night) may be divided. One class aims at a
more or less exact transcription; the other
definitely sets out to abbreviate. Even if the latter
class be credited with a number of copies which
hardly merit the name, the former is by far the
larger, and, of course, the more important, though it
must not be supposed that the latter is unworthy of
notice. The abbreviators generally omit whole
chapters, or passages, at a time, and, where they are
not for the moment doing this, or writing the
connecting phrases necessary to repair their
mischief, they are often quite faithful to their
originals. Since they do not, in general, attribute
anything to their author that is not his, no
objection can be taken, on moral grounds, to their
proceeding, though, in actual fact, the results are
not always happy. Their ends were purely practical
and devotional and they made no attempt to pass their
compendia as full-length transcriptions.

With regard to the Spiritual Canticle and the Living
Flame of Love, of each of which there are two
redactions bearing indisputable marks of the author's
own hand, the classification of the copies will
naturally depend upon which redaction each copy the
more nearly follows. This question will be discussed
in the necessary detail in the introduction to each
of these works, and to the individual introductions
to the four major treatises we must refer the reader
for other details of the manuscripts. In the present
pages we have attempted only a general account of
these matters. It remains to add that our divisions
of each chapter into paragraphs follow the
manuscripts throughout except where indicated. The
printed editions, as we shall see, suppressed these
divisions, but, apart from their value to the modern
reader, they are sufficiently nearly identical in the
various copies to form one further testimony to their
general high standard of reliability.

IV
INTEGRITY OF THE SAINT'S WORK -- INCOMPLETE CONDITION
OF THE 'ASCENT' AND THE 'NIGHT' -- DISPUTED QUESTIONS

THE principal lacuna in St. John of the Cross's
writings, and, from the literary standpoint, the most
interesting, is the lack of any commentary to the
last five stanzas[27] of the poem 'Dark Night.' Such
a commentary is essential to the completion of the
plan which the Saint had already traced for himself
in what was to be, and, in spite of its unfinished
condition, is in fact, his most rigorously scientific
treatise. 'All the doctrine,' he wrote in the
Argument of the Ascent, 'whereof I intend to treat in
this Ascent of Mount Carmel is included in the
following stanzas, and in them is also described the
manner of ascending to the summit of the Mount, which
is the high estate of perfection which we here call
union of the soul with God.' This leaves no doubt but
that the Saint intended to treat the mystical life as
one whole, and to deal in turn with each stage of the
road to perfection, from the beginnings of the
Purgative Way to the crown and summit of the life of
Union. After showing the need for such a treatise as
he proposes to write, he divides the chapters on
Purgation into four parts corresponding to the Active
and Passive nights of Sense and of Spirit. These,
however, correspond only to the first two stanzas of
his poem; they are not, as we shall shortly see,
complete, but their incompleteness is slight compared
with that of the work as a whole.
Did St. John of the Cross, we may ask, ever write a
commentary on those last five stanzas, which begin
with a description of the state of Illumination:

'Twas that light guided me, More surely than the
noonday's brightest glare --
and end with that of the life of Union:

All things for me that day Ceas'd, as I slumber'd
there, Amid the lilies drowning all my care?
If we suppose that he did, we are faced with the
question of its fate and with the strange fact that
none of his contemporaries makes any mention of such
a commentary, though they are all prolific in details
of far less importance.

Conjectures have been ventured on this question ever
since critical methods first began to be applied to
St. John of the Cross's writings. A great deal was
written about it by P. Andrés de la Encarnación, to
whom his superiors entrusted the task of collecting
and editing the Saint's writings, and whose findings,
though they suffer from the defects of an age which
from a modern standpoint must be called unscientific,
and need therefore to be read with the greatest
caution, are often surprisingly just and accurate. P.
Andrés begins by referring to various places where
St. John of the Cross states that he has treated
certain subjects and proposes to treat others, about
which nothing can be found in his writings. This, he
says, may often be due to an oversight on the
writer's part or to changes which new experiences
might have brought to his mode of thinking. On the
other hand, there are sometimes signs that these
promises have been fulfilled: the sharp truncation of
the argument, for example, at the end of Book III of
the Ascent suggests that at least a few pages are
missing, in which case the original manuscript must
have been mutilated,[28] for almost all the extant
copies break off at the same word. It is unthinkable,
as P. Andrés says, that the Saint 'should have gone
on to write the Night without completing the Ascent,
for all these five books[29] are integral parts of
one whole, since they all treat of different stages
of one spiritual path.'[30]

It may be argued in the same way that St. John of the
Cross would not have gone on to write the
commentaries on the 'Spiritual Canticle' and the
'Living Flame of Love' without first completing the
Dark Night. P. Andrés goes so far as to say that the
very unwillingness which the Saint displayed towards
writing commentaries on the two latter poems
indicates that he had already completed the others;
otherwise, he could easily have excused himself from
the later task on the plea that he had still to
finish the earlier.

Again, St. John of the Cross declares very
definitely, in the prologue to the Dark Night, that,
after describing in the commentary on the first two
stanzas the effects of the two passive purgations of
the sensual and the spiritual part of man, he will
devote the six remaining stanzas to expounding
'various and wondrous effects of the spiritual
illumination and union of love with God.' Nothing
could be clearer than this. Now, in the commentary on
the 'Living Flame,' argues P. Andrés, he treats at
considerable length of simple contemplation and adds
that he has written fully of it in several chapters
of the Ascent and the Night, which he names; but not
only do we not find the references in two of the
chapters enumerated by him, but he makes no mention
of several other chapters in which the references are
of considerable fullness. The proper deductions from
these facts would seem to be, first, that we do not
possess the Ascent and the Night in the form in which
the Saint wrote them, and, second, that in the
missing chapters he referred to the subject under
discussion at much greater length than in the
chapters we have.

Further, the practice of St. John of the Cross was
not to omit any part of his commentaries when for any
reason he was unable or unwilling to write them at
length, but rather to abbreviate them. Thus, he runs
rapidly through the third stanza of the Night and
through the fourth stanza of the Living Flame: we
should expect him in the same way to treat the last
three stanzas of the Night with similar brevity and
rapidity, but not to omit them altogether.

Such are the principal arguments used by P. Andrés
which have inclined many critics to the belief that
St. John of the Cross completed these treatises.
Other of his arguments, which to himself were even
more convincing, have now lost much weight. The chief
of these are the contention that, because a certain
Fray Agustín Antolínez (b. 1554), in expounding these
same poems, makes no mention of the Saint's having
failed to expound five stanzas of the Night, he did
therefore write an exposition of them;[31] and the
supposition that the Living Flame was written before
the Spiritual Canticle, and that therefore, when the
prologue to the Living Flame says that the author has
already described the highest state of perfection
attainable in this life, it cannot be referring to
the Canticle and must necessarily allude to passages,
now lost, from the Dark Night.[32]

Our own judgment upon this much debated question is
not easily delivered. On the one hand, the reasons
why St. John of the Cross should have completed his
work are perfectly sound ones and his own words in
the Ascent and the Dark Night are a clear statement
of his intentions. Furthermore, he had ample time to
complete it, for he wrote other treatises at a later
date and he certainly considered the latter part of
the Dark Night to be more important than the former.
On the other hand, it is disconcerting to find not
even the briefest clear reference to this latter part
in any of his subsequent writings, when both the
Living Flame and the Spiritual Canticle offered so
many occasions for such a reference to an author
accustomed to refer his readers to his other
treatises. Again, his contemporaries, who were keenly
interested in his work, and mention such
insignificant things as the Cautions, the Maxims and
the 'Mount of Perfection,' say nothing whatever of
the missing chapters. None of his biographers speaks
of them, nor does P. Alonso de la Madre de Dios, who
examined the Saint's writings in detail immediately
after his death and was in touch with his closest
friends and companions. We are inclined, therefore,
to think that the chapters in question were never
written.[33] Is not the following sequence of
probable facts the most tenable? We know from P. Juan
Evangelista that the Ascent and the Dark Night were
written at different times, with many intervals of
short or long duration. The Saint may well have
entered upon the Spiritual Canticle, which was a
concession to the affectionate importunity of M. Ann
de Jesús, with every intention of returning later to
finish his earlier treatise. But, having completed
the Canticle, he may equally well have been struck
with the similarity between a part of it and the
unwritten commentary on the earlier stanzas, and this
may have decided him that the Dark Night needed no
completion, especially as the Living Flame also
described the life of Union. This hypothesis will
explain all the facts, and seems completely in
harmony with all we know of St. John of the Cross,
who was in no sense, as we have already said, a
writer by profession. If we accept it, we need not
necessarily share the views which we here assume to
have been his. Not only would the completion of the
Dark Night have given us new ways of approach to so
sublime and intricate a theme, but this would have
been treated in a way more closely connected with the
earlier stages of the mystical life than was possible
in either the Living Flame or the Canticle.
We ought perhaps to notice one further supposition of
P. Andrés, which has been taken up by a number of
later critics: that St. John of the Cross completed
the commentary which we know as the Dark Night, but
that on account of the distinctive nature of the
contents of the part now lost he gave it a separate
title.[34] The only advantage of this theory seems to
be that it makes the hypothesis of the loss of the
commentary less improbable. In other respects it is
as unsatisfactory as the theory of P. Andrés,[35] of
which we find a variant in M. Baruzi,[36] that the
Saint thought the commentary too bold, and too
sublime, to be perpetuated, and therefore destroyed
it, or, at least, forbade its being copied. It is
surely unlikely that the sublimity of these missing
chapters would exceed that of the Canticle or the
Living Flame.

This seems the most suitable place to discuss a
feature of the works of St. John of the Cross to
which allusion is often made -- the little interest
which he took in their division into books and
chapters and his lack of consistency in observing
such divisions when he had once made them. A number
of examples may be cited. In the first chapter of the
Ascent of Mount Carmel, using the words 'part' and
'book' as synonyms, he makes it clear that the Ascent
and the Dark Night are to him one single treatise.
'The first night or purgation,' he writes, 'is of the
sensual part of the soul, which is treated in the
present stanza, and will be treated in the first part
of this book. And the second is of the spiritual
part; of this speaks the second stanza, which
follows; and of this we shall treat likewise, in the
second and the third part, with respect to the
activity of the soul; and in the fourth part, with
respect to its passivity.'[37] The author's intention
here is evident. Purgation may be sensual or
spiritual, and each of these kinds may be either
active or passive. The most logical proceeding would
be to divide the whole of the material into four
parts or books: two to be devoted to active purgation
and two to passive.[38] St. John of the Cross,
however, devotes two parts to active spiritual
purgation -- one to that of the understanding and the
other to that of the memory and the will. In the
Night, on the other hand, where it would seem
essential to devote one book to the passive purgation
of sense and another to that of spirit, he includes
both in one part, the fourth. In the Ascent, he
divides the content of each of his books into various
chapters; in the Night, where the argument is
developed like that of the Ascent, he makes a
division into paragraphs only, and a very irregular
division at that, if we may judge by the copies that
have reached us. In the Spiritual Canticle and the
Living Flame he dispenses with both chapters and
paragraphs. The commentary on each stanza here
corresponds to a chapter.

Another example is to be found in the arrangement of
his expositions. As a rule, he first writes down the
stanzas as a whole, then repeats each in turn before
expounding it, and repeats each line also in its
proper place in the same way. At the beginning of
each treatise he makes some general observations --
in the form either of an argument and prologue, as in
the Ascent; of a prologue and general exposition, as
in the Night; of a prologue alone, as in the first
redaction of the Canticle and in the Living Flame; or
of a prologue and argument, as in the second
redaction of the Canticle. In the Ascent and the
Night, the first chapter of each book contains the
'exposition of the stanzas,' though some copies
describe this, in Book III of the Ascent, as an
'argument.' In the Night, the book dealing with the
Night of Sense begins with the usual 'exposition';
that of the Night of the Spirit, however, has nothing
to correspond with it.

In the first redaction of the Spiritual Canticle, St.
John of the Cross first sets down the poem, then a
few lines of 'exposition' giving the argument of the
stanza, and finally the commentary upon each line.
Sometimes he comments upon two or three lines at
once. In the second redaction, he prefaces almost
every stanza with an 'annotation,' of which there is
none in the first redaction except before the
commentary on the thirteenth and fourteenth stanzas.
The chief purpose of the 'annotation' is to link the
argument of each stanza with that of the stanza
preceding it; occasionally the annotation and the
exposition are combined.

It is clear from all this that, in spite of his
orderly mind, St. John of the Cross was no believer
in strict uniformity in matters of arrangement which
would seem to demand such uniformity once they had
been decided upon. They are, of course, of secondary
importance, but the fact that the inconsistencies are
the work of St. John of the Cross himself, and not
merely of careless copyists, who have enough else to
account for, is of real moment in the discussion of
critical questions which turn on the Saint's
accuracy.
Another characteristic of these commentaries is the
inequality of length as between the exposition of
certain lines and stanzas. While some of these are
dealt with fully, the exposition of others is brought
to a close with surprising rapidity, even though it
sometimes seems that much more needs to be said: we
get the impression that the author was anxious to
push his work forward or was pressed for time. He
devotes fourteen long chapters of the Ascent to
glossing the first two lines of the first stanza and
dismisses the three remaining lines in a few
sentences. In both the Ascent and the Night, indeed,
the stanzas appear to serve only as a pretext for
introducing the great wealth of ascetic and mystical
teaching which the Saint has gathered together. In
the Canticle and the Living Flame, on the other hand,
he keeps much closer to his stanzas, though here,
too, there is a considerable inequality. One result
of the difference in nature between these two pairs
of treatises is that the Ascent and the Night are
more solidly built and more rigidly doctrinal,
whereas in the Canticle and the Flame there is more
movement and more poetry.

One well-known example will be
found in the commentary on the 'Spiritual Canticle,' Chap. xii
(cf. Sect. V below).

24.

MS. 12,738, fol. 639.

25.

To these we shall refer in the
third volume of this edition.

26.

If any single person could have
spoken from knowledge of this matter it would be P. Alonso de
la Madre de Dios, as all papers connected with St. John of the
Cross passed through his hands and he took hundreds of
depositions in connection with the Beatification process. His
statements, however (MS. 19,404, fol. 176 [P. Silverio, I,
179]), are as vague as any others. Rather more reliable are
the Saint's two early biographers, P. José de Jesús María (Quiroga)
and P. Jerónimo de San José. The former states in one place
that he is using an autograph on the Ascent of Mount Carmel,
but again it seems likely that he was mistaken, since the
archives of the Reform were still intact in the next century
and no genuine autograph of any length was found in them.

27.

[The commentary on the third
stanza is begun in ii, xxv of Dark Night. If this be not
counted, the number of stanzas left uncommented is six.]

28.

This is not so unlikely as it may
seem, for the early manuscripts were all either unbound, or
very roughly stitched together, and several of the extant
copies have leaves missing. It was not till the time of the
Beatification Process that greater care began to be taken of
the Saint's writings, and they were bound strongly and even
luxuriously.

29.

I.e., the three books of the
Ascent and the two of the Night.

30.

MS. 3,180, Adición B.

31.

It would be natural enough, of
course, for Fray Agustín Antolínez to have noted this fact,
but, as he makes no mention of St. John of the Cross at all,
nothing can be safely inferred from his silence. It may be
added that Fray Agustín's commentary is to be published by the
Spanish Augustinians [and that P. Silverio (I, 190-3 ) gives a
specimen of it which shows how well it deserves publication].

32.

As we shall later see, the Living
Flame was written after the first redaction of the Spiritual
Canticle, but before the second redaction, which mentions the
Living Flame in the exposition of Stanza XXXI, thus misleading
P. Andrés as to its date. There is no doubt, in our mind, that
the reference in the preface to the Living Flame is to the
Canticle: the description fits it exactly.

33.

[P. Silverio's words are: 'For my
own part, I think it very probable that he never composed
them.' I myself give a little less weight to the negative
evidence brought forward, and, though I too am inclined to the
negative solution, I should hold the scales between the two
rather more evenly.]

34.

If this were so, we might even
hazard a guess that the title was that given in the Living
Flame (I, 21) and not exactly applicable to any of the
existing treatises, viz. The Dark Night of the Ascent of Mount
Carmel.

35.

Memorias Historiales, C. 1 3.

36.

Saint Jean de la Croix, pp. 1
3-15.

37.

Cf. Ascent, I, i, below.

38.

Some manuscripts do in fact divide
the treatise in this way; but apart from the fact that we have
the authority of St. John of the Cross himself, in the passage
just quoted (confirmed in Ascent, I, xiii), for a different
division, the Alcaudete MS., which we believe to be the most
reliable, follows the division laid down by the Saint. We may
add that St. John of the Cross is not always a safe guide in
these matters, no doubt because he trusted too much to his
memory; in Ascent, II, xi, for example, he calls the fourth
book the third.